The windswept landscape and welcoming locals of the sleepy peninsula of Nova
Scotia seem to celebrate all things Scottish, says Nigel Richardson.

When Iain MacDonald, a Nova Scotian lobster fisherman, fell for Sabra MacGillivray, the woman who became his wife, there were some raised eyebrows around the village of Lanark. “When I started coming knocking on the door her mother got worried,” said Iain, laughing at the idea, “because she was a MacDonald too.”

In fact such coincidences are as common as the southeasterlies that blow through this corner of Nova Scotia, threatening to whisk away the clapboard houses like the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz. Nova Scotia’s Latinised name encapsulates both the natural and human history of a windswept land that, with New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, forms the Maritime Provinces of Canada’s Atlantic seaboard.

I met Iain and Sabra MacDonald in the restaurant of the Glenora Inn and Distillery on Cape Breton, the northern extremity of Nova Scotia that lifts a granite snout towards Newfoundland across the Cabot Strait. Next door in the bar a fiddle player was playing a Highland jig. Outside, a bonny burn ran through the distillery’s grounds and the undulating horizon lines were serrated by the tops of a million spruce and fir. So utterly authentic was the Scottishness that I found myself muttering a line from that quintessential Scottish film Local Hero: “Strange times, Archie, strange times.”

Iain’s family, he told me, came here from the Knoydart peninsula, or possibly South Uist (the genealogy gets a bit confusing, he said) in 1806. When they landed they probably rubbed their eyes and wondered if they had sailed in a circle. Sabra’s ancestors were already here, having come over from the Isle of Eigg on the first settler ship from Scotland, Hector, in 1773 (the ship landed on the north coast at Pictou, which now proclaims itself the “Birthplace of New Scotland”; a replica of Hector docked at the quayside is a museum that tells the story).

Those immigrants came because they had to – many were displaced by the Highland Clearances – and this experience of exile informs who and what their descendants are. “I know that Glasgow, for instance, thinks of itself as a modern European city now,” said Iain MacDonald, between mouthfuls of lobster and scallop fettuccine. But the MacDonalds, MacMasters and MacGillivrays of Nova Scotia just want to celebrate the Scottishness they were cheated out of 200 years ago.

For the British visitor this is both charming and disconcerting. I arrived there from London in six and a bit hours – far less than the driving time from London to the Scottish Highlands – braced for an American-style, post 9/11 grilling at immigration, and the immigration officer was the epitome of old-world courtesy. During a week when I drove around on near-empty roads, not one hotel receptionist asked for my passport, or any form of ID.

Then, at a whisky distillery, I met a lobster fisherman who was a dead ringer for Gavin Hastings, the former Scottish rugby captain, and whose wife, it turned out, was a champion of competitive Highland dancing. And outside it looked like the Trossachs. Strange times indeed.

But actually, like all rewarding destinations, Nova Scotia is not one-dimensional. Hastily swapping costumes in the course of a sunny autumn week, it could look like a perfect and timeless New England, of white clapboard houses, pumpkins basking on lawns, barns painted the red of fresh blood, with those faceted gambrel roofs that look like tight spinster’s bonnets, shallow bays strewn with lozenge-shaped pink granite rocks, and stumpy little lighthouses. And its history has undercurrents as treacherous as its seas.

The First Nation Mi’kmaq people have lived in this corner of north-eastern North America since the last Ice Age. They suffered the usual persecution at the hands of white incomers, and the 13,000 who now live in the province have yet to fold their culture into the tourism mainstream, which is a definite lacuna for the curious visitor. Predating the Scots were the French, and their history is as rich and intriguing as the accented English their descendants speak.

Settlers from western France arrived in the early 1600s and called the land they claimed Arcadia, the pastoral paradise of Classical mythology. Over time the word was corrupted to Acadia and the settlers became known as Acadians.

Then the English redcoats bowled up, insisted the Acadians swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown, and when they refused deported some 10,000 of them and burned their houses. This ethnic cleansing took place at the about the same time as the Highland Clearances. What followed was a grotesque merry-go-round of deportation, exile and immigration played out across the Atlantic and up and down the Atlantic seaboard of North America, in which some Acadians returned while Highland Scots and settlers from New England were arriving for the first time.

Many Acadians ended up in Louisiana, where their name was further shortened and roughed up until it emerged as “Cajun”. The story of this grand dérangement, as the Acadians refer to it, is meticulously chronicled at the old Acadian village of Grand-Pré in the Annapolis Valley. The village was torched by the English in 1755 – there is no trace of the old buildings – and is now a National Historic Site with visitor centre, exhibition hall, cinema, reconstructed church and landscaped gardens planted with French willows.

From Grand-Pre I drove in a loop around the western bulge of the province, past signs for “Apple U Pick” and clapboard homesteads serene in their pools of green, the fence-free lawns intersecting in a continuum of suburban harmony. Union jacks were flying at Shelburne. Rather sinister-looking Halloween figures strutted the front gardens of Mahone Bay.

Every night was spent at a different “historic inn” or b&b, each with an interior that was a pastiche of an Edwardian English parlour: floral wallpaper and tablecloths, gilt framed paintings of foxhunting in the shires, stuffed birds, an antique globe, the odd baby grand or chess set for good measure. It was the kind of wholesomeness that made me think of axe murderers – Stephen King, too, apparently, as Nova Scotia has impersonated Maine in films of several of his books.

The food and drink were far from a horror show – Nova Scotia produces drinkable wines and hoteliers just have to trail their hands in the Atlantic to bring up wonderful lobster, scallops, mussels and halibut, which they serve both largely unadorned and reimagined in chowders, bisques and pasta recipes. In one place, decor and cuisine came together in a glorious synthesis of international quality and style. That place was Trout Point, a wilderness lodge in the western interior where refugees from Louisiana have created a Cajun-Acadian gastronomy of simple excellence. That night I dined on squash blossoms stuffed with beef and crabmeat, sat around a camp fire and watched the merest flickering of the aurora borealis in the northern sky.

The following morning I was served breakfast by Sandra, an Englishwoman who lived in Exeter till three years ago. She described her former life as “rush rush rush” and admitted that Nova Scotia had taken some getting used to: “People were bringing us gifts and we were like, 'What do they want?’”

Even to a native of Halifax, the province’s friendly capital – where the traffic stops dead to let jaywalkers cross the road – the boondocks of Nova Scotia can seem sleepy. In Lunenburg, a sloping grid of brightly painted houses and white churches, there was scarcely a soul on the street. Outside the back of the Dockside Restaurant a chef on his cigarette break told me he had moved there from Halifax seeking a quiet and safe place to bring up his daughter.

“Yep, it’s just a drinkin’ town with a fishin’ problem,” he said, rehearsing a phrase that fishing ports the world over have adopted. “But I can stick my hand up here and feel like the mayor every day of the week. Wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

From Lunenburg I put my foot down to drive the 300 miles north-east to Cape Breton and its hillsides of spruce and fir. The day after my dinner with Iain and Sabra, very late of the Western Isles, I drove up into the Cape Breton Highlands National Park and walked one of its famously scenic trails, the Skyline Trail.

In the teeth of a fierce but balmy southwesterly I glided through a forest of conifers, golden ferns and the ghostly silver trunks of dead birch to a series of descending boardwalks above the glittering Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

On the way I fell into step, and conversation, with a fellow hiker, a Nova Scotian who had reservations about the compliments I proceeded to pay to his home province regarding its gentle old fashionedness.